Mark Hassoun, technical director at Anomali.
Cyber security software distributor Solid8 Technologies and its partner Anomali will feature at the ITWeb Security Summit JHB 2026, helping CISOs learn how to ensure return on investment (ROI) from AI.
The summit takes place on 2 and 3 June at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, with workshops scheduled for 4 June.
Mark Hassoun, technical director of Anomali, will address issues business leaders and security specialists continue to grapple with, including cost efficiency from AI and the expected payback period for security investments.
Alexandre Depret-Bixio, SVP international at Anomali, says security leaders face intense pressure from boards demanding financial accountability. “CISOs must translate cyber risk into business impact – productivity gains – and do it in language that lands in the executive suite, not just the security operations centre,” he says. “Counting alerts, tools and log volumes won’t tell a board whether the organisation is more resilient than it was last year. That is where AI ROI stops being a technical conversation and becomes a strategic imperative.”
Hassoun and Depret-Bixio say AI ROI in cyber security is real, but only when applied correctly. “ROI does not come from AI features but from AI embedded across the entire security workflow – from ingestion to investigation to response,” says Hassoun. When applied correctly, organisations can benefit from faster investigations, reduced analyst time, lower infrastructure costs and consolidation of legacy platforms.
“AI-driven productivity gains and cost reduction are often more immediate and measurable than risk avoidance alone,” adds Depret-Bixio.
Anomali argues that traditional security metrics are insufficient for evaluating AI investments. Instead, companies should focus on practical measures such as time to detect and investigate, analyst workload reduction, cost per investigation, data retention versus cost and tool consolidation savings.
The company says meaningful ROI does not require years to achieve. When AI is built into a unified platform with an integrated data lake, payback can begin in months, value is realised incrementally from day one, and organisations can replace legacy tools at their own pace.
Among the challenges associated with AI investment, Anomali points to the threat landscape outpacing human-scale operations, alert fatigue and skills shortages, data fragmentation, legacy cost models breaking under modern threat pressure, and the fact that many AI security solutions fail to deliver real returns.
These issues play out against mounting pressures for CISOs: security risk is now a board-level concern, threat volume and complexity grow faster than teams and budgets, and tool sprawl and data silos undermine effectiveness.
Speaking to ITWeb ahead of the summit, Harold van Graan, COO of Solid8 Technologies, says the event will help attendees understand how AI can be applied to security operations in practice, not just in theory.
